In our culture, we are not so familiar with the notion of ways or paths. It is a concept that comes from ancient China, the notion of a universal lawfulness of all things, including being, non-being, and the changing nature of everything. This is known as the Tao, or simply “the Way,” with a capital W. The Tao is the world unfolding according to its own lawfulness. Nothing is done or forced, everything just comes about. To live in accord with the Tao is to understand non-doing and non-striving. Your life is already doing itself. The challenge is whether you can see in this way and live in accordance with the way things are, to come into harmony with all things and all moments. It has nothing to do with either passivity or activity. It transcends opposites. This is the path of insight, of wisdom, and of healing. It is the path of acceptance and peace. It is the path of the mind-body looking deeply into itself and knowing itself. It is the art of conscious living, of knowing your inner resources and your outer resources and knowing also that, fundamentally, there is neither inner nor outer. It is profoundly ethical.
There is still far too little of this in our education. As a rule, our schools do not emphasize being, or the training of attention, although this situation is changing rapidly.* When mindfulness is not taught in school, we are left to sort out the domain of being for ourselves. It is doing that is still the dominant currency of modern education. Sadly, though, it is often a fragmented and denatured doing, divorced as it is from any emphasis on who is doing the doing and what we might learn from the domain of being. And often, far too often, our doing is under the pressure of time, as if we were being pushed through our lives by the pace of the world, without the luxury of stopping and taking our bearings, of knowing who is doing all the doing, and why. Awareness itself is not highly valued, nor are we taught the richness of it and how to nurture, use, and inhabit it—how it can round out the limitations and sometimes the tyranny of thinking, and provide a counterbalance to our thinking and our emotions, serving as the independent dimension of intelligence that it actually is.
It might have helped us considerably to have been shown, perhaps through some simple exercises in elementary school, that we are not our thoughts, that we can watch them come and go and learn not to cling to them or run after them. Even if we didn’t understand it at the time, it would have been helpful just to hear it. Likewise, it would have been helpful to know that the breath is an ally, that it leads to calmness just by watching it. Or that it is okay to just be, that we don’t have to run around all the time doing or striving or competing in order to feel that we have an identity—that we are fundamentally whole as we are.
We may not have gotten these messages as children, except perhaps those generations who watched Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood or Sesame Street, but it is not too late. Anytime you decide that it is time to reconnect with the domain of your own wholeness is the right time to start. In the yogic traditions, age is measured from when you started practicing, not from when you were born. So, by this point, if you have started practicing, you may now be only a few days or weeks or months old! How nice.
Strange as it may seem, this is the real work we invite the people who are referred by their doctors to the Stress Reduction Clinic to engage in. It is the exploring of the notion that there is a way of being, a way of living, a way of paying attention that is like starting afresh, that is liberating in and of itself, right now, within all one’s suffering and the turmoil of life. But to explore it as an idea or a philosophy would be a dead exercise in thinking, just more ideas to fill our already overcrowded minds.
You are invited, in the same spirit as our patients are invited, and in the abiding spirit of mindfulness and MBSR, to work at making the domain of being an ally in your life, to walk the path of mindfulness and see for yourself how things change when you change the way you are in relationship to your body, to your mind, to your heart, and to the world. As we saw at the very beginning, it is an invitation to embark on a lifelong journey, an invitation to see life as an adventure in awareness.
This adventure has all the elements of a heroic quest, a search for yourself along the path of life. It may sound far-fetched to you, but we see our patients as heroes and heroines in the Greek sense, on their own personal odysseys, battered about by the elements and the fates, and now, having embarked upon this journey of healing and the realization of wholeness, finally treading the path toward home.
As it turns out, we don’t have to look very far to reconnect with our deepest selves on this quest. At any moment, we are very close to home, much closer than we think. If we can simply realize the fullness of this moment, of this breath, we can find stillness and peace right here. We can be at home right now, in our body as it is, in this moment as it is.
When you walk the path of awareness, you are bringing a systematic consciousness to the experience of living that only makes living more vibrant, more real. The fact that no one ever taught you how to do this or told you that it was worth doing is immaterial. When you are ready for this quest, it finds you. It is part of the Way for things to unfold like this. Each moment truly is the first moment of the rest of your life. Now really is the only time you have to live.
Mindfulness practice provides an opportunity to walk along the path of your life with your eyes open, awake instead of half unconscious, responding consciously in the world instead of reacting automatically, mindlessly. The end result is subtly different from the other way of living in that we know that we are walking a path, that we are following a way, that we are awake and aware. No one dictates to you what that path is. No one is telling you to follow “my way.” The whole point is that there is only one way, but that way manifests in as many different ways as there are people and customs and beliefs.
Our real job, with a capital J, is to find our own way, sailing with the winds of change, the winds of stress and pain and suffering, the winds of joy and love, until we realize that we have also in some sense never left port, that we have never been separate from our truest self—that we are always at home in our own skin, or can be if we simply remember.
There is no way to fail in this work if you approach it with sincerity and constancy. Meditation is not relaxation spelled differently. If you do a relaxation exercise and you aren’t relaxed at the end, then in some sense you have failed. But if you are practicing mindfulness, then the only thing that is really important is whether you are willing to look and to be with things as they are in any moment, including discomfort and tension and your ideas about success and failure. If you are, then there is no failure.
Similarly, if you are facing the stress in your life mindfully, you cannot fail in your responses to it. Just being aware of it is a powerful response, one that changes everything and opens up new options for growth and for doing.
But sometimes those options don’t manifest right away. It may be clear what you don’t want to do but not clear yet what you do want to do. These are not times of failure either. They are creative moments, moments of not knowing, moments to be patient, centered in not knowing. Even confusion and despair and agitation can be creative. We can work with them if we are willing to be in the present from moment to moment with awareness. This is Zorba’s dance in the face of the full catastrophe. It is a movement that carries us beyond success and failure, to a way of being that allows the full spectrum of our life experiences, our hopes and our fears, to play itself out within the field of life itself unfolding, flowering in each moment we are fully present with it, for it, and in it.
The Way of Awareness has a structure to it. In this book we have gone into that structure in some detail. We have touched on how it is connected to health and healing, to stress, pain and illness, and to all the ups and downs of the body, the mind, the heart, and life itself. It is a path to be traveled, to be cultivated through daily practice. Rather than a philosophy, it is a way of being, a way of living your moments and living them fully. This way only becomes yours as you travel it yourself.
Mindfulness is a lifetime’s journey along a path that ultimately leads nowhere, only to who you are. The Way of Awareness is always here, always accessible to you, in each moment. After all is said and done, perhaps its essence can only be captured in poetry, and in the silence of your own mind and body at peace.
So, having arrived at this point on our journey together, let’s let the moment be cradled in the vision of the great Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, in a poem he called “Keeping Quiet.”
Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.
For once on the face of the earth,
let’s not speak in any language;
let’s stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.
It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.
Fishermen in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would look at his hurt hands.
Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.
What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about;
I want no truck with death.
If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.
Now I’ll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.
* Now there is a strong and growing movement to bring mindfulness into primary and secondary education, as well as into the curriculm of colleges and universities.